


a long unbroken light

by brella



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Character Study, Ensemble Cast, Gen, Team Dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-19
Updated: 2019-10-19
Packaged: 2020-12-23 20:55:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21087683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brella/pseuds/brella
Summary: Hinata sprints for the net, two long strides and then a stop, arms swinging out behind him like they'll carry him beyond the clouds, close enough to swallow the sun itself. “Bring it to me!” he shouts, and Kageyama does—and Keishin, standing next to Takeda on their insignificant patch of earth, watches them fly.A coach's observations of the Karasuno Volleyball Club, across three summers.





	a long unbroken light

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for _Fly High_, a [Team Karasuno zine](https://twitter.com/team_karasuno)! I was very honored to be a part of this project, and to be able to pay tribute to this fictional volleyball team I love so fiercely. I'm rooting for them, always. Karasuno fight.
> 
> This was published in the zine with the title "a soft unbroken light," but I got fussy when I realized it would look to similar to another of my fic titles, "a soft place to fall," and changed it. Can't have that. Can't have same words.
> 
> I listened to [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLX-nyMUW_8) a lot while writing.

“They’re strong.”

Keishin isn’t sure he hears the words, at first. The gymnasium is full up with the clamor of shouting voices and squeaking sneakers, the intermittent slap of a ball against a palm; the occasional cries of _nice serve_, _one more_, _don't mind_. But the words are there underneath it all, uttered with a quiet, breathless wonder, as if unconsciously. 

Takeda’s always been a soft-spoken guy, but there’s a quality to him that lends his words a certain gravity—how carefully he handles them, maybe, as though each one is alive. 

Keishin turns his head, arms folded loosely at his chest, and grunts questioningly. He's got a sunburn healing on the back of his neck that's itching like crazy. He could really go for an aloe vera drink right about now. 

Takeda jumps, lifting his hands as if instinctively poised to reassure someone. "A-Ah, sorry, I—I was just talking to myself, Ukai-kun." 

Keishin reaches up to scratch his head. It's been a good few months now since he came on as coach for Karasuno, but sometimes he still feels like there are edges of him and Takeda that aren't quite aligning right, carved too harshly by some combination of his gruffness and Takeda’s diffidence. He’s got no clue how to smooth it down except with practice. 

He follows Takeda’s line of sight to the upper left court, just in time to see Tsukishima get a dump in on Nekoma. The team rallies around him: Tanaka and Nishinoya clapping him on the back with synchronized braying laughs; Hinata fruitlessly trying to corral him into position for a high-five. Nekoma looks more tired than they had at their early-week matches, but whether that’s due to Karasuno’s renewed prowess or the endless practicing starting to take its toll is hard to say. 

"Ours, you mean?" Keishin asks Takeda, who fidgets under the attention. “You think they’re strong?”

“I-I may be wrong,” he says, hands scrambling. He pushes up his glasses when they start to slip down the sweat on his nose. “I still only have a novice’s perspective, after all—”

“Don’t sell yourself short,” Keishin says. 

He turns his head back to watch the match dwindle to a close, Kageyama setting a god-like quick to Hinata in a blink or a breath or something in between. Haiba, Kuroo, and Fukunaga are all in position for a block, but at the last second Hinata wipes it, slamming the ball against Haiba's fingers so that it ricochets out of bounds. The scorekeeper flips to the next digit—19 to 21. It’s been a two-point difference all afternoon. Nekoma’s ahead by one set. 

As Tanaka barrels over to ruffle a blushing Hinata’s hair, Keishin chuffs out a laugh. 

“Ukai-kun—” Takeda hesitates beside him. “Do... do _you_ think they're strong?”

Keishin had always hated summer training camps the most in his high school days. He can’t imagine these guys feel much different. The heat starts to take on a life of its own, bogging down the air instead of inhabiting it. Even with the AC on full blast, the gym is humid with so many active bodies. The buzzing of the cicadas from outside seeps in through the high open windows; the unveiled sunlight spills onto the wooden floor in abundance. All day he’s been daydreaming about a cold beer after dusk, crowding around a table with the other coaches, laughing freely among the moths and the crickets and the stars. 

It’s been a week of unprecedented growth for Karasuno. Truth be told, Keishin had been a little worried at the beginning that their team was fracturing, hairline cracks in the foundation that wouldn’t be evident at first but could eventually lead to an irreparable seismic event. Losing is never easy for anyone, after all—not even brave fools like theirs. 

But like so many times since that first afternoon Takeda had brought him back to a gym still rustling with memories, these fools have proven him wrong. They’ve gotten pretty good at that.

Still, strength has taken on a different meaning for him now. He considers Takeda’s question. What was it the old man used to say? Strong players can decide a match, but a strong team can decide a tournament—and then maybe something larger than all of them. Something as boundless and elusive as what they are worth. 

Sawamura calls for a synchronized attack. Nekoma falters, scatters. Azumane follows the pipe; he smashes the ball straight across a clear, unobstructed court. When he comes back down, Nishinoya scrabbles up his back like some kind of amped-up koala, crowing praise. Hinata looks dazzled and proud and envious, but the fear and greed of three days ago are gone now as if they'd never been there at all. 

20 to 22. 

Takeda says Keishin’s name again, pulling him back. 

“Mm,” Keishin says, thoughtful and subdued. Maybe they can all stop for popsicles on the way back. He’d have to buy them out of pocket, but that’s okay. They’ve earned it. 

Hinata sprints for the net, two long strides and then a stop, arms swinging out behind him like they'll carry him beyond the clouds, close enough to swallow the sun itself. “Bring it to me!” he shouts, and Kageyama does—and Keishin, standing next to Takeda on their insignificant patch of earth, watches them fly. 

_Because we don’t have wings_, he thinks, and to Takeda’s expectant face, he answers: “They’re the strongest players I know, sensei.” 

* * *

The second summer that Takeda drives them to the Tokyo suburbs in a rented van, the rainy season comes later than usual. They lose two days of the training camp to a power outage and flooding. By the end of it, Keishin has spent more time conspiring with Takeda and Yachi to keep their restless team of fifteen entertained in the stormy darkness of a cramped classroom than he has coaching them. 

But maybe that’s just fate, working away. He’s not sure it will be a productive year anyway. Recalibrating the cogs (as Takeda’s so fond of calling them) after the departure of their third-years has, so far, been disastrous. It hasn’t helped that they’ve lost their last four matches, practice or otherwise, though maybe that had just been inevitable—a residual sting that nothing he does can lessen. He’s humble enough to know that by now. 

But still—watching Hinata whiff his fifth spike in a row, watching Kageyama seethe and blame himself for it instead of yelling at him, Keishin wants nothing more than to slip outside into the remnants of the monsoon and smoke for hours. 

“Sensei,” he says to Takeda, who’s sitting neatly next to him in a fold-out chair, studying the flawlessly organized spreadsheet that Shimizu had left them with in the spring, “you’ve always been better at this stuff.” 

Takeda blinks up at him, eyes round behind the lenses. His hair is frizzier than normal in the humid air, sticking out in all directions. 

“What stuff?” he asks. He had cried at the graduation, quoting a poem that Keishin hadn’t bothered to look up, but now kind of wishes he had. 

Keishin looks back at the court. Shinzen’s going to win the match—everyone knows it by now. This is always the hardest to watch: Karasuno faltering, listless beneath the weight of a defeat they can’t outfly. 

Sawamura would know the right thing to say. Sugawara, too. Asahi would land a kill, reinvigorate them, renew their belief in miracles. Shimizu would be frank, unfaltering; compassion disguised as calm. And something would _change_, as surely as the rain coming and going in June, year after year. 

Keishin had rolled his sleeves up to his shoulders this morning, hot and frustrated and miserable. It hadn’t made much difference. He scratches at his bare arm, not looking at Takeda when he mutters, “Teaching them how to lose.” 

Takeda thinks for a moment. Keishin lets the sounds of spikes and blocks populate the silence.

“You once spoke about muscles, Ukai-kun,” Takeda eventually says. “Straining, tearing—but repairing themselves so that they’re stronger than before.” He nods to the court, where Shinzen’s wing spiker has just bluffed Kinoshita, opening an easy pathway past a halfhearted block. His team high-fives him, and Kinoshita’s jaw is tense, silent. “Like all things—like muscles—we recover from trauma, from overextension. They will, too.” 

“You sure about that?” 

Takeda’s mouth thins. He watches their team in the new arrangement of jerseys: Tanaka in #3, Ennoshita in #1, Nishinoya in #2. They’d given #5 to a first-year, Hayato—another frighteningly bright libero from Chidoriyama—so that Hinata could keep #10. 

“I’m sure, Ukai-kun. At the end of the day, they’re strong.” His hand tightens, on his knee, into a fist. “The rest will follow, in time.” 

* * *

Hinata does outfly the Little Giant, in the end. 

Keishin has always been of the mind that comparing players is, at its core, unfair—apples and oranges, the old man would say—but there’s no changing the truth, and in its way, being proud has always felt better than being practical. The fact of the matter is that, during Hinata’s final year on the Karasuno volleyball team, any opposing players who confront him in midair battles can’t touch him. It’s unbelievable enough to watch, but more unbelievable still to remember him when he hadn’t even thought to open his eyes.

Their third summer in Tokyo is the hottest of them all, or maybe it just feels that way—one constant, unfaltering afternoon. The smell of sweat and grass drying, the sound of cicadas. The kind of summer made for watermelons. 

Hinata had given up #10 on the first day of his third year. Nakanishi, a soft-spoken first-year wing spiker, has it now. Keishin still remembers Sugawara saying that #3 had always belonged to the ace at Karasuno—maybe Hinata, who now wears the number that used to be Azumane’s, remembers, too. 

“Cover!” Hinata cries from the floor, scrambling back to his feet as the ball he’d just received sails toward the back line. It had been a chance ball, a rare slip-up on Fukurodani’s part. 

Tsukishima is there in an instant. “Yamaguchi,” he calls, and bump passes it seamlessly to the left, where Yamaguchi is waiting. 

“I’ve got it!” Yamaguchi shakes some of his hair out of his face and rushes into position near— “Kageyama!” 

The way he shouts it—as though it’s their last hope in the world, even though it’s just a practice match, even though Inter-High is still a good distance away—makes pride flare in Keishin’s chest. Yamaguchi’s a good captain, reliable like Daichi and dedicated like Ennoshita, and vice captain suits Hinata more than Keishin would have thought. 

“Excellent,” he hears Takeda cheer under his breath, and when Keishin turns to look at him, he’s met with a grin. 

“Go, Kageyama-senpai! Hinata-senpai!” shouts Isobe, their rowdy second-year middle-blocker, the antithesis of Tsukishima. From the back, Hayato spreads his feet and roars to Fukurodani’s ace, “_Bring it_!” 

It’s funny, Keishin thinks. The chasms left behind as their team shrinks and shifts and grows again can seem so insurmountable, but in the end it’s all relative. The way that Isobe’s voice reverberates off the floor can sound like Tanaka’s, sometimes, or Nishinoya’s. Passion tends to reach the same pitch. 

“Hinata told me once that he could see things in mid-air,” Keishin says. Takeda watches him intently. “Like, when he jumps—he can perceive things in slow motion. The blockers’ hands, the weave on the net. It sounded nuts to me. I thought, there’s no way anyone can see that.” 

Takeda lets out a laugh, running a hand through his hair. “I don’t blame you. They’re something else, aren’t they?”

Keishin nods. “Never experienced it myself, but I’d heard of players who did.” The shoes hitting the hardwood have a rhythm to them like a heartbeat, if he listens. “I guess some people are just born for it. Volleyball, I mean. Would you call that strength?” 

“Even if I would,” Takeda tells him, sounding amused, “which I wouldn’t—that’s unusually superstitious for you, Ukai-kun. Are you saying you believe in fate?” 

Kageyama, in jersey #4, watches the arc of the ball, easing into a setting position. The clarity in his eyes all but chills the whole gym. From the bench, the others—Arinaga, Satou, Sasaki, Mikami, Goto—are all shouting different things, things like _go_, things like _fly_. Hinata rushes toward the net. Then crouches. Then leaps. 

Keishin wonders how summer always feels so long and ends so fast. 

Hinata’s straight smashes through Fukurodani’s wall and hits the unobstructed ground, and that’s—26 to 24. The referee’s whistle blows, and then it’s a mess of high-fives and half-hugs and laughter, as though Karasuno has just won the sun itself, and not their first practice match of the day. 

Keishin links his hands behind his head, stretching until his body is satisfied. He remembers those days. Even now, he remembers them. 

“I dunno, sensei,” he says, and watches Kageyama ruffle Hinata’s hair. “Do you?” 

* * *


End file.
